Intervention (Hidden)
The firm-level intervention is aimed at reducing information frictions for firms interested in doing business with the government. It consists of two treatment arms, T1 and T2. T1 aims at providing information about tender opportunities to a subset of firms, in two ways. First, our research team, for the full duration of the intervention (i.e., approximately October 2019 to October 2020), will manually and daily collect all information about tender opportunities through all newspapers published in Uganda and by going over all sources of online news about tenders (including individual PDE websites). This information will then be shared through email/sms/whatsup to the T1-treated firms twice a week for a full year; importantly, each firm will only receive tenders that are marked as potentially interesting for them, after a selection made by our research team based on the tender description and the sector and economic activity of the firm. In the final phase of the project, we may select only a subset of the eligible tenders to disseminate, so as to have contract-level exogenous variation as well. Second, we collect procurement plans of most PDEs, and we shared these with firms; we do so only in February 2020, so that the staggered implementation allows us to look at its differential impact. T2-treated firms will instead receive the T1 treatment and, in addition to that, a further treatment component. Specifically, T2 firms will also receive a one-time financial reimbursement for the purchase of bidding documents from an entity with which the firm did not do business before and for which the firm was not prequalified for. In the final phase of the project we may allow for a larger financial incentive or more than one reimbursement per firm.
The PDE-level intervention is aimed at reducing information frictions for PDEs, considering that the majority of contracts are based on non- fully competitive methods that rely on an initial shortlisting of a limited numbers of firms by public officials. This intervention has one treatment arm T. T consists of the delivery of physical booklets containing a list of firms that are pre-qualified with any entity in Uganda (or directly in the PPDA Registry of Providers), organized by specific economic activity and location. Each treated PDE receives three booklets, one for each main sector (works, supply, services). Notice that while each PDE has direct access to its own list of pre-qualified firms, and can potentially request access to the Registry of Providers from PPDA, it is practically extremely difficult to access other PDEs’ pre-qualified lists, as these were only available on paper formats which we were the first to ever digitize (specifically for this project). Starting in February 2020, until the end of 2020, both T and control PDEs will receive a monthly email and sms notification by PPDA, with a reminder that they are encouraged to use all available sources of information when pre-selecting potential bidders.